A United Nations panel has decided that Julian Assange's three-and-a-half years in the Ecuadorian embassy amount to "arbitrary detention", the Guardian understands, leading his lawyers to call for the Swedish extradition request to be dropped immediately. Assange had appealed to the UN working group on arbitrary detention in 2014, arguing that he was illegally confined to the embassy because he risks arrest if he leaves. The WikiLeaks founder sought asylum from Ecuador in July 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning over rape and sexual assault allegations.

The panel's findings were disclosed to the Swedish and British governments on 22 January, and will be published tomorrow. Assange's Swedish lawyer, Per Samuelson, said if the working group found in his favour, "there is only one solution for Marianne Ny [the Swedish prosecutor seeking Assange's extradition], and that is to immediately release him and drop the case". Samuelson added: "If he is regarded as detained, that means he has served his time, so I see no other option for Sweden but to close the case." Assange's lawyers also demanded assurances from the UK that he would not be arrested and subjected to potential extradition to the US, which he fears.

Julian Assange will demand on Friday that Sweden and the UK lift any threat of arrest to allow him to walk free from Ecuador's embassy in London, after a United Nations panel found that his three-and-a-half year confinement at the embassy in London amounted to "arbitrary detention". Sweden's foreign ministry confirmed on Thursday that the UN panel, which will publish its findings on Friday, had decided in favour of the WikiLeaks founder and found that he was "arbitrarily detained".

Assange has not set foot outside the cramped west London embassy building since June 2012, when he sought asylum from Ecuador in an attempt to avoid extradition to Sweden. The Australian is wanted for questioning over an allegation of rape dating to 2010, which he denies. The findings of the UN working group on arbitrary detention (UNWGAD) are not legally binding, but can be used to apply pressure on states in human rights cases. The British and Swedish governments were informed of the working group's conclusion on 22 January. Both indicated on Thursday that they do not accept its findings.

The 8,761 documents published by WikiLeaks focus mainly on techniques for hacking and surveillance

The US intelligence agencies are facing fresh embarrassment after WikiLeaks published what it described as the biggest ever leak of confidential documents from the CIA detailing the tools it uses to break into phones, communication apps and other electronic devices. Thousands of documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking, including how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices.

The leak, dubbed "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, will once again raise questions about the inability of US spy agencies to protect secret documents in the digital age. It follows disclosures about Afghanistan and Iraq by army intelligence specialist Chelsea Manning in 2010 and about the National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ by Edward Snowden in 2013.

The documents appear to be from the CIA's 200-strong Center for Cyber Intelligence and show in detail how the agency's digital specialists engage in hacking. According to the documents:

- CIA hackers targeted smartphones and computers.
- The Center for Cyber Intelligence is based at the CIA headquarters in Virginia but it has a second covert base in the US consulate in Frankfurt which covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
- A programme called Weeping Angel describes how to attack a Samsung F8000 TV set so that it appears to be off but can still be used for monitoring.

The CIA declined to comment on the leaks beyond the agency’s now-stock refusal to verify their contents. "We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents", wrote CIA spokesperson Heather Fritz Horniak. But it is understood the documents are genuine and a hunt is under way for the leakers or hackers responsible for the leak.

WikiLeaks will work with technology companies to help defend them against the CIA's hacking tools, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Thursday. The approach sets up a potential conflict between Silicon Valley firms eager to protect their products and an agency stung by the radical transparency group's disclosures. In an online news conference, Assange acknowledged that some companies had asked for more details about the CIA cyberespionage toolkit whose existence he purportedly revealed in a massive leak published Tuesday.

"We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out", Assange said. Once tech firms had patched their products, he said, he would release the full data of the hacking tools to the public. Assange said some of the small fixes could be issued by tech companies "potentially in two to three days", but problems that affected more critical aspects of computer codes, such as those in televisions or phones, could take a lot longer.

So far, the CIA has declined to comment directly on the authenticity of the leaked documents. On Thursday a CIA spokesman said Assange "is not exactly a bastion of truth and integrity", but he reiterated an agency statement issued Wednesday that suggested the release had equipped adversaries "with tools and information to do us harm". Assange began his news conference with a dig at the agency for losing control of its cyberespionage arsenal, saying that all the data had been kept in one place. "This is a historic act of devastating incompetence", he said, adding: "WikiLeaks discovered the material as a result of it being passed around".

Assange said the technology was nearly impossible to keep under wraps - or under control. "There's absolutely nothing to stop a random CIA officer or even a contractor from using the technology", Assange said. "The technology is designed to be unaccountable, untraceable; it's designed to remove traces of its activity". On Tuesday, after WikiLeaks posted the documents, public advocacy groups raised questions about whether the CIA was doing enough to tell technology companies about vulnerabilities in their products.

<< Another day, another government spying exploit rises to the surface courtesy of Wikileaks, this time originating from the CIA. This WikiLeaks data dump specifically lets us know of a CIA-engineered spying tool called OutlawCountry (no space), which, interestingly enough, explicitly targets Linux users. You know, those digital freedom loving passionate penguin peeps that appreciate having great control over their computer? But don't worry, the CIA has targeted Windows users en masse in the past as well; absolutely no one has proven safe and they obviously don't discriminate.

OutlawCountry starts out as a Linux kernel module (nf_table_6_64.ko) that gets loaded into the system and subsequently creates a new entry in the iptables firewall configuration. After the deed is done, the original kernel module is no longer needed, so it's deleted.

At this point, an attacker could run an iptables command to reroute all of the traffic through a designated CIA data mining server, allowing the agency to spy on user activities and communications. The biggest threat here isn't winding up with the attack on a home PC, but more so a web server that could have thousands or even millions of people routing through it. >>